Old News Entry – 1998

English

We are here in Tarboro visiting Thad’s parents and little sister. Right now we are very relieved to be out of school. We finished our spring semester on May 1, and now we are taking it easy for a while until we leave for Taiwan. We have tickets booked to leave from New York on June 24 to go via San Francisco to Taipei. When we arrive in Taipei we will have about a week to get settled before school starts again. We will be studying Chinese at the Mandarin Training Center until sometime in February 1999. After that, we will be traveling to Beijing to study even more Chinese at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) before we do our internships. We are, or course, incredibly excited about going, it’s going to be an amazing adventure. I don’t think it has hit us yet that we will be spending a year and a half in Asia. Right now it just feels great that we actually managed to get through the spring semester. Mibs 702 was pretty exhausting and hectic, but it feels great to finally be done. It is sort of sad too, because many of the nice people we have met in our classes are in two year tracks (like French and German), so we may never see them again. Until we leave we have no real plans. We will probably travel around a little, visiting friends and relatives, and try to do as many “American” things as possible. Disney World and some other amusement parks (plus as many movies as possible) may be on the agenda.